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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Twilight for the conservative era of school reform?

An inconvenient truth is that the grand tradition of using the bully
pulpit to push for curriculum reform began with the Reagan
administration under his second education secretary, William J. Bennett.
Bennett used that bully pulpit to forcefully push for a combination of
changes—curriculum reform, accountability, and choice—that he believed
could help drive excellence in U.S. schools.

Conservative anxiety over conservative/libertarian attacks against Common Core is reaching a crescendo. The moderate conservatives at Fordham, who remember the genesis of national standards, wonder if the end of corporate school reform may be near.

The funny thing about eras is that it’s hard to know which one you
are in until it is coming to an end. As the fighting among conservatives
heats up over the Common Core, the era of standards-driven reform that
has defined conservative education policy for the past three decades is
brought into sharper relief.

Arne Duncan and Bill Bennett

But the approach that President Reagan and his secretary of education
Bill Bennett helped set in motion in the 1980s is under increasing
assault from a resurgent libertarian movement and the coopting of many
of the most popular ideas by a reform-minded Democratic president and
his own energetic secretary of education. Is 2014 the year the
conservative push for curricular and instructional excellence comes to
an end?

Those looking for answers would be wise to track the increasingly
acerbic discussion over the Common Core State Standards. What began as a
conversation about the quality, content, and rigor of the standards has
evolved into an increasingly polarized political debate that is
fracturing support for one of the most enduring conservative reforms...

Much of the anti–Common Core ire is aimed at the Obama administration
and its activist education secretary, Arne Duncan. Critics believe that
by incentivizing CCSS adoption through Race to the Top and by continuing
to express public support for the standards, Duncan and his team are
essentially usurping control over curriculum and instruction from the
states...

Our slim new book Knowledge at the Core: Don Hirsch, Core Knowledge, and the Future of the Common Core
has three large aims. First, it pays tribute to three decades of
scholarship and service to American education by E. D. (Don) Hirsch,
Jr., author of Cultural Literacy (and three other prescient
books on education reform) and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation.
Second, it restates the case for a sequential, content-rich curriculum
for America’s elementary and middle schools. Third, it strives to chart a
course for the future, a future in which many more schools embrace
Hirsch’s Core Knowledge program—or something akin to it—en route to
successful attainment of the Common Core State Standards for English
language arts/literacy and mathematics.

Five of the essays included in the volume were first presented at a
December 2013 conference in Washington, D.C., cohosted by the Fordham
Institute and the Manhattan Institute. Video from that event, and a
terrific documentary about Don and his contributions to American
education, are available on our website at edexcellence.net/hirsch.

That day left us hopeful—not a word that often comes to mind amidst
the rancorous debates now swirling about education in general and the
Common Core in particular. Yet Don himself is, by admission, an
unwavering optimist; his enthusiasm is as contagious as his ideas are
bracing. So in that spirit, let us make the hopeful case that many more
of America’s schools are on the precipice of finally embracing those
ideas—and thereby boosting their students’ chances of achieving the
lofty goals that the Common Core standards prescribe.

Rethinking reading

Commence with this key Hirsch insight: Teaching knowledge is teaching
reading—and reading will never be mastered beyond the “decoding” stage
without a solid foundation of knowledge. Children cannot be truly
literate without knowing about the world—about history, science, art,
music, literature, civics, geography, and more. This is not a value
statement about what students “should” study; rather, it reflects
decades of cognitive science and reading research.

Once children learn to decode the words on a page, greater literacy
is attained only through greater knowledge. Reading comprehension, and
thus learning by reading, depends on knowing something about the content
of the passage at hand. If a fifth grader knows a lot about baseball,
for example, she will comprehend complex stories about baseball at a
high level. But if she doesn’t know a lot about the ocean, she will
struggle to comprehend anything beyond simple, introductory books about
marine life. The only way to help children become strong readers,
regardless of topic, is to equip them with a large store of general
knowledge—to help them learn something about everything. And that means
implementing a well-designed, sequential, content-rich curriculum,
especially in the early grades.

Yet most American primary schools have been marching in the opposite
direction: treating reading as a “skill” and pushing off history,
science, art, and music “until later.” As Ruth Wattenberg, the former
editor of the AFT’s American Educator magazine, explains in her
essay, the elementary-school curriculum has been a content-free
wasteland for decades, one that grew even more barren in the No Child
Left Behind era. Is it any wonder that, even as national assessment data
have shown decent gains in math achievement in recent years (at least
in the early grades), reading outcomes remain dismal? Although some
relatively small gains have been made (most likely due to Reading
First’s spread of phonics-based decoding instruction), high-school
scores have been flat for decades.

Bad news. But there’s some encouraging news, too. In his essay, based
on focus groups that he conducted with teachers, Steve Farkas explains
that elementary teachers welcome the notion of a knowledge-rich
curriculum. Indeed, they take for granted that it’s valuable. They may
have been taught otherwise in ed school, but they’re not philosophically
opposed; most aren’t even aware of the ideological battles waged
between “progressives” and “traditionalists” within the halls of
academe. Building students’ knowledge is, to most teachers, simply
common sense—and they’d like to do more of it. But first, the misguided
progressive ideas shaping schools need to be more widely recognized, as
Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern writes in his trenchant essay.

Another bit of good news: the single greatest force currently shaping
American education—the new Common Core standards, now in place in
forty-five states—explicitly endorses Hirsch’s ideas and calls for the
kind of curriculum that he favors:

While the Standards make references to some particular
forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and
Shakespeare, they do not—indeed, cannot— enumerate all or even most of
the content that students should learn. The Standards must therefore be
complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent
with the expectations laid out in this document.” —Common Core State
Standards

Says Robert Pondiscio, executive director of the advocacy group
CitizenshipFirst, those are “the most important fifty-seven words in
education reform since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983.”
But they are, alas, just words on a page. They’re not hard to
decode—but how many people grasp their content? How many states and
school districts will heed their call?
Though fundamentally an optimist, Don Hirsch does not yet observe
much heeding. In his keynote address to the December conference,
included in our book as the essay “Sustaining the American Experiment,”
he expresses his worry:

District preparations for the Common Core in language
arts are looking like district preparations for No Child Left Behind,
with lots of how-to processes, under new names, but with no emphasis on
systematically imparting facts—which are still considered “mere.”

That’s precisely what Wattenberg found when she examined textbooks,
basal readers, and state websites that are supposedly “Common Core
aligned.” They do, indeed, pay attention to the skills demanded by the
standards, even to the challenge to assign “appropriately complex
texts.” But in almost every case, they ignore (or never even understand)
the charge to put in place a content-rich curriculum so that students
can actually read these more challenging texts with understanding.

And while most rank-and-file teachers have no ideological bone to
pick with content knowledge, many of their supervisors and
administrators still hold fast to the false dichotomies and faulty
notions that Hirsch has debunked for years. Just weeks ago, Carmen
Fariña, the new chancellor of the New York City Public Schools,
displayed her own misunderstanding of the role that knowledge plays in
education: “It’s always been something I’ve believed in—we learn facts
maybe to take tests, but we learn thinking to get on in life.” (As if
one can fruitfully think if one doesn’t know anything.) In his keynote,
Don said, “The effectiveness of the Common Core standards will depend on
the adequacy of the ideas held by those who try to put them into
effect.” Indeed...

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Why This Blog?

So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

I have listened to so many commentaries over the years about what should be done to improve Kentucky's schools - written largely by folks who have never tried to manage a classroom, run a school, or close an achievement gap. I came to believe that I might have something to offer.

I moved, in 1985, from suburban northern Kentucky to what was then the state’s flagship district - Fayette County. I have had a unique set of experiences to accompany my journey through KERA’s implementation. I have seen children grow to graduate and lead successful lives. I have seen them go to jail and I have seen them die. I have been amazed by brilliant teachers, dismayed by impassive bureaucrats, disappointed by politicians and uplifted by some of Kentucky’s finest school children. When I am not complaining about it, I will attest that public school administration is critically important work.

Democracy is run by those who show up. In our system of government every citizen has a voice, but only if they choose to use it.

This blog is totally independent; not supported or sponsored by any institution or political organization. I will make every effort to fully cite (or link to) my sources. Please address any concerns to the author.

On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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